Tulsa March for Life tonight marks 40 years after Roe v. Wade

In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the U. S. Supreme Court decision that overturned abortion laws in nearly every state, and in memory of the 55 million unborn children killed since that time by legal abortion in America (a holocaust that rivals Communist Russia and Communist China in scope and surpasses Nazi Germany by a factor of 10), the fourth annual Tulsa March for Life will begin at 8th and Boulder downtown tonight, Tuesday, January 22, 2013, at 7:00 pm. The march will proceed to Centennial Green at 6th and Boston, for a rally at which pro-life activist Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will be the keynote speaker.

In a 2012 op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, Diana Schaub points to Baltimore's astronomical abortion rate (in 2005, 86.2 abortions per 1,000 women) as a cause of the city's decline:

It is this matter of ethos that is crucial, according to Montesquieu. He argues that "the chief cause [of depopulation] is to be found in a change of customs." Not surprisingly, the customs he focuses on are those most entwined with human procreation and childrearing -- above all, the status of the institution of marriage (although he doesn't neglect another closely related matter: the spirit of commerce and industry). In his examination of factors that can undermine the fruitfulness and health of populations, he singles out "the cruel habit the women [of some locales] have of aborting themselves, so that their pregnancy will not make them disagreeable to their men."

The decline of marriage, particularly among African-Americans, is all too familiar. Not as well-known is that Maryland has a very high abortion rate (third highest among the states in 2005, the year that the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene stopped collecting abortion statistics). The breakdown by jurisdiction reveals that Baltimore City is driving those deadly numbers, and also that the abortion rate among African-American women is at least triple the white rate.

Even for those in favor of legal abortion, the situation should be dismaying. And it certainly represents what Montesquieu termed "a change of customs." For comparison: In 1970, Baltimore City abortion rates for single white and black women stood at 7.43 and 10 respectively (the abortion rate is the number of abortions per 1,000 women ages 15-44), with the married women's rates half that. By 2005, the Baltimore rate was 86.2. The National Abortion Rights Action League, which cites that figure, did not provide the African-American rate, but it would be substantially higher.